The Nomadic Alternative – Page 194

IV

The long-settled Chinese have always alerted themselves to signals from the remote prehistoric past and acted upon them. This attitude has determined the even tenor of Chinese civilization, for whenever the Son of Heaven or his successor, the Party Chairman, has appeared to reduce millions of men to the status of cogs in a bureaucratic machine, a Taoist sage seems to hover over his shoulder, smiling at the futility of the enterprise. In its later stages Taoism devolved into a sort of religious mysticism, but at the outset it was simply a code of prehistoric ethics which tempered the excesses of civilization. The Taoists maintained an open-ended line of communication with a stratum of archaic values which had survived in remote areas or in the 'shamanic' practices of the common folk.

They denied all value to the presumptions of the Confucians who, as heirs of the Shang pastoralists, attuned their philosophy to the moral order of feudal society. The Confucians managed men. And their Way had crystallized into the State. The Taoists looked beyond the State to man's rightful place in the Tao or Way of Nature, and assumed human morality to be self-adjusting if people were not perverted by imposed controls. Allowing his intuition to guide him the 'perfect' or enlightened man calmly harmonized his life to the "beautiful actions of Heaven and Earth" and refrained from anything contrary to the natural order. He flowed like the stream that gradually wears away mountains. For feminine yieldingness ultimately triumphed over masculine assertion. "How did the great rivers and streams get their kingship over the hundred rivers", asks a question in the Tao-Te-Ching; "through being lower than they".

To rediscover human potential, the earliest Taoist texts hearkened back to the 'natural liberty' and 'primitive solidarity' (shun phu) enjoyed in the age of perfect virtue when, in the words of Chuang Tzu, "men lived in common with birds and beasts and formed